mardi 16 juin 2009

Poshboard PowerShell Snapin

Poshboard comes with a PowerShell Snapin with several cmdlets that generate PowerShell custom objects. These objects are then converted to Silverlight controls in Poshboard. The properties / methods used for these cmdlets are equivalent of Silverlight controls properties.

The logic of Silverlight objects is respected: you’ll find the corresponding properties of Silverlight controls in the PowerShell objects (It ease the learning process as you’ll find Silverlight sample on internet that you can convert to Poshboard PowerShell objects).

Note: not every Silverlight controls properties are available in Poshboard cmdlets, because they are not useful in the context of Poshboard (or due to a lack of time..). But the main idea was to keep the object model simple to understand. In the future, if some properties prove to be really needed, they will be added to the solution easely in future updates.

.NET developer that got previous experience on Silverlight development will also be able to rapidly develop PowerShell controls, as the logic is the same (but with the benefice of the Dynamic and model of PowerShell! )

Snapin relationship with PoshBoard and Silverlight

Poshboard use WCF to enable communicate between Silverlight clients (your web page) and the Poshboard server. PowerShell objects are created by the user scripts, and these objects are then converted to Silverlight control and dynamically added to the Silverlight GUI, along with the results of other PowerShell cmdlets (you can re use any kind of script that you already designed, or downloaded from internet)